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In the News (from Times Online): “Kapital Gains” What with the humbling of some of the world’s grandest banks, the world has been moving in mysterious ways. But few as mysterious as the current climb up Germany’s bestseller lists of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital – a book which tends to be more bought than read. … Marx’s German publisher says sales have been soaring.

My Comment: It’s obvious that our generation is still not morally mature enough to adopt the system of equal and fair distribution according to the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Marx also recognizes that only “…at advanced levels of the collective society, once people’s primitive hierarchy of the distribution of labor disappears, and together with it, the contradiction between the physical and mental work, when the work itself will become the primary need instead of the means of existence, when along with the comprehensive individual development, the forces of production will prosper and all the sources of public happiness will spill in their great abundance – then once and for all the narrow bourgeois views will be rejected, and the society will write on their banner: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”

Marx maintained that the society develops by means of colliding forces in it, advancing from one state to the next through cause and consequence. As the negative force increases, it destroys the current state, and then the positive force forms a better state. And this goes on until the positive force is revealed in all its perfection.

But a question arises: should we then just wait for the negative force to bring our society to the best possible state? The problem is that the development by means of the negative force’s influence is lengthy and full of suffering. However, humans, unlike animals (which aren’t able to influence nature), can use the power of thought (the mind) to learn from nature about how to act on our own. We can thereby escape the influence of the negative force, and start controlling our development.

For example, when a person has to produce many chickens, he does not sit and wait for the hen to hatch the eggs to get the necessary quality and quantity of chicks. He instead creates an incubator that produces the chicks at the necessary time and in the necessary quantity and quality.

The same thing happens in the realm of general human development: Man can observe and track Nature’s actions by looking at the process of social development. He can then find an efficient, convenient method that will enable him to reach a happy final goal in the shortest time and with the least suffering.